56 posts tagged “poetry”
A superabundance
May it shower down upon us
like baby peony
petals
I am brave
I tell him the truth. I need
Replacement Buddhas...
The secret of the spoon...
which although they do not exist in reality
seem to do so.
--I thought I could be his nurse
& heart & soul
and I see he is the leader
I look at him emotionally
sexually...
Deer Lady
is dressed in human clothes
Someone wants to make love to her.
She kisses him
In the dark
the spotlight shows the passionate couple
in a yabyum embrace.
She is the rustle of the top most branches
and the sigh of new green grass.
His eyes they are the same
he has been here for three
thousand years.
"I see the unicorn before me"
thinks she
an excitement
from the position of his body
he is poised as if to make
balance
in the universe.
For how long we sit
in quiet
no speech
creates a
tie
between us
for I am young & yet
I know what I am doing.
(His world is slippery to hold on to)
Heaven
explodes the walls
against the pattern of fleur-de
-lis and marigolds
And seasons spring
and fall.
Soft as
a throw of silk
she said, perhaps
I dreamed it all.
the length & breadth
of all that chasing
&
how Homer dislikes Paris
sneaking through his house
He has little rival
and lets no one know.
The real earth
moves and falls away into pieces in the north.
I am mortal.
You dream of me
a deeper forest I came from
running for
the center where you look too.
A jeweled tree poet's tree
I look around at the shimmering
energy
from things that seem as symbols.
I am curious
for what you can bring
from the tree.
You called to the words
and the waters went up in mist
then the soft earth came to sight.
We shall circle here
singing for the evening star.
*
"O what can a poor boy do"
BE AS FIRM AND RESOLUTE
IN ACTION AS ABLE.
The action by which s/he sustains creation
is the same as that by which s/he originally created.
Tho
one cannot so well learn a thing
when it has been learned from others
as when one has discovered it himself.
*
Time is moving out from under us
Who are we
Who are we
violet of memory's flat plain
we embrace, swallow the sea
walk, past centuries into poetry
form pleasant contemplation of innocence
in lucid suspension sing:
"we would not feel so alone
if everybody just got stoned"
*
Monkey man is leading me by the hand
past lovers so entwined
I levitated
in the most elevated
State of the Union.
And back to the body
where I was born:
pink tips that are fingers
eyes sparkling
heart-shaped bottom
I love her
and him.
I invoke the moon;
it's the best I can find.
Can you see you're it
Oh Moon
he makes love to you
a life time. Plays
to as many people as he can...
*
Who am, was, I?
All of it, all of it.
I am here at 3
now it seems I lead.
A lady in white
bathed by my own silver light.
*
FATHER TIME
& MOTHER EARTH
thought about all of you last night
and a great blue heron came up
and the other animals came close
all gods in the human breast.
O don't let me swoon
you intercepted my vibes.
that's fine.
Now you have a sweet tone.
tree holes.
boobies.
smooth countenance mind transmission.
*
I am a writer.
I will not dwell
on the question
of why.
Psyche
is not a personal
but a world experience.
I am in a bed in a hotel
having a talk with consciousness.
OK, I am actually in bed with _____.
I exist outside time &
this world I called my own
opens out.
Sometimes I lay in the bathtub chanting OM
I know I don't suffer more than anyone
I read Cixous, Jung
The feminine spirit infuses these words.
*
I sing:
You showed me the meadow
and milkwood and silkwood
and you would if I would
cause threads that are golden
don't break easily.
Joanne sings:
Me is memory
take me out
May your flowery
face bow
in the teeny
trembling world.
*
I am that which god wants
brilliant quince in bloom
we meet once again, friend.
*
Electric enlightenment
is in
your sexy heaven
which I am inventing
O My Big One
(we make it up as we go along)
(& aren't you glad I don't write Cock Poems?
as suggested
by Robert Duncan)
Come back!
Your presence is an aphrodisiac.
*
I know this is a detective story
of passions, blood stuff
around which our lives crank
in a friendly sinuous manner
sultry as a New York poetry trip
where we danced all night under
electric candlelight. Worthy
to uncover the hidden home
of the Dakini, wash, bathe, lay
papers with meaning aside.
Not yet tho. The
rare jewel, the rare jewel
caught in the net invisible.
I must be transplanting poppies,
I am noting your strong ripply
vibration aura
and making you an axe
with my axe handle.
--Ann Arbor to Pennsylvania
May 12, 2008
There were:
luques grilled shrimp manchego cheese
poetry Riesling The Kinks
couscous Absinthe* Beethoven
art by Joe Brainard yellow tulips tiny purple flowers
trees in blossom scent of ginger, scent of purple tiny portrait of Jim Carroll
Extraordinary Machine omelets fresh parsley, oregano
Red Renunculous Redbud, Crabapple, Dogwood Spider Chrysanthemum
Arvo Part "In the Sprintime of His Voodoo" peppermint & lavender soaps
Oysters! Pelegrino blackberries, passionfruit tiny photo of an angel
"love the one you're with" earrings made of crushed Roman glass
"you go back Jack/ do it again/ we're turning round and round..."
people of all nationalities many flashing cameras (Andrea's med-school graduation)
and finally there was Rilke:
XXI
Spring is back. The earth
is like a child, the poem white
much, o much.....for the trouble
of long learning, she wins the prize.
Her teacher was strict. We liked
the white in the beard of the old man.
Now, when we ask what the green
and the blue mean, she knows, she knows!
Earth, you lucky one, play
with the children. We want to
catch you, happy earth.
The happiest succeeds.
O, what her teacher taught her
and what stands in roots and
long difficult stems: she sings it, she sings!
*Absinthe is now legal in two places in the United States: Ann Arbor and California.
Words for Love
Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.
I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o'clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.
By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists, compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock René
Rilke Benedict Arnold I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.
At night, awake, high on poems, or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black, and blue. Bosky. Oubliette. Dis-
severed. And O, alas
Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 pm. It is time to steal books. It's
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalpyse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?
Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless
--Ted Berrigan
May 1, 2008
Little boy comes up:
"Can I be teacher?"
"No."
Great blue eyes like wheels.
Today: ecology, biology,
botany.
Last night: Erika.
"Leute, gehen wir tanzen?"
(People, are we going dancing?)
The wish to dance: honor that.
Remember Joanne Kyger?
Mahalia Jackson swinging it.
(Man get relaxed
Woman get permanent)
Back in classroom.
Little boy looks blank.
Can't think what to write.
He's new, doesn't like science,
I sympathize.
"Which of the following
is not the main function
of roots?"
sea urchins.
Cross-pollination:
braincandy transfer.
Allowishes Dalloway wunderkind
Dalhousie aluminum dactyl
synergy Sisyphus sizzle
chlorine Chamomile candyass
candyass Michaelmas mercurial
druid deliberate delineate
circuitry clearcut cumpassionate
tertiary tenuous telepath
*
Now my charms are all o'erthrown
and what strength I have's mine own
which is most faint, tis true
I must be here confined by you
or sent to Naples
Let me not, since I have my queendom got
and pardoned the deceiver, dwell
on this bare island by your spell
but release me from my bands
with the help of your good hands
Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill
Or else my project fails, which was to please
Now I want art to enforce and spirits to enchant
and my ending is despair
unless I be relieved by prayer
which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself
and clears all faults
As you from crimes would pardoned be
Let your indulgence set me free.
I was a hobbit
you were an elf
we made love
in Vondel Park.
***
The dream yellow and
little hidden
in the inner low bowl
and most recesses
of what is opening
into cosmic night.
Psyche
was there, was consciousness, a door
Psyche
who will secret the soul
(Eleni's bored, uh-oh)
Don't stop
Just keep the green birds in the air. Where?
The dream
is verifiable or tenable
I am pursuing and therefore
I must content
with the fact that means something:
patient.
Is this going to be a poem about Philip Whalen?
Who is Philip Whalen?
Undulating layers of
unsaying
The undercurrent is love
The current of love...
Transfer those electrons to him.
Illusion birds in Amsterdam
where love rules
there is no will to power
and where power predominates
love is lacking
the one is the shadow of the other.
I am thinking of a man
his sole purpose
is to kindle a light
in the darkness
by mere being.
In sleep, fantasy
the form of dream
but in waking life
we continue.
On the other hand
I know that if
on a dream we
meditate and thoroughly
discern around us
over and over the human existence
it is a hint to the patient.
[Prelude to the letter C]
I met Ted at two parties at the same house
at the first he insulted me because, he said later
he was mad at girls that night; at the second we danced
an elaborate fox-trot with dipping--he had once taken one lesson
at an Arthur Murray's. First I went into an empty
room and waited for him to follow me. I liked the way
his poems looked on the page open but delicately arranged.
I like him because he's funny he talks more like
me than like books or words: he likes my knowledge and
accepts its sources. I know that there are Channel swimmers
and that they keep warm with grease because of
an Esther Williams movie. We differ as to what kind
of grease I suggest bacon he says it's bear
really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car
Who's ever greased a car? Not him I find he prefers to white out
all the speech balloons in a Tarzan comic
and print in new words for the characters. Do you want
to do some? he says--No--We go to a movie where Rachel Welch
and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him
laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot
Do you mean, I say, when she said We should have keeled him long ago?
Finally a man knows that I'm being funny
He's eleven years older than me and takes pills
I take some a few months later and write
I think it's eighty-three poems I forget about Plath and James Wright
he warns me about pills in a slantwise way See this
nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization
I notice some broken capillaries who cares
I wonder who I am now myself though I haven't
anticipated me entirely I have such an appetite
to write not to live I'm certainly living quity fully
We're good together he says because we can be like
little boy and little girl I give him much later a
girl's cheap Dutch brooch Delft blue and white
a girl and a boy holding hands and windmills
But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for
Europe gives me the key to his library stored
in a room at The Writer's Workshop
I write mildly yet oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"
how a street turns that sensation to make it permanent
a daily transition as the curve opens and is walked on
of the kinds of experience still in between the ones
talked about in literature and even in Ted's library
which finally makes poetry possible for me but I've
not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be
--from Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley
1. Sushi is a rare and wonderful thing; I love it.
2. Once painted a Japanese-style portrait of Wen's cat, Zeeb (notreallyahabit tho).
3. Alice Notley is my favorite poet, however Ken Mikolowski is up there too...
4. My sister and I visited Barcelona in 2000 and smoked some great hash.
5. Long term memory fantastic; short term memory not so much (see #4).
6. My favorite coffeeshop is Cafe Zola.
7. Gauloises when I lived in Munich, American Spirits in the States.
8. I write poetry almost every day, baring my breasts so you'll bare yours...
9. Triangles.
10. Other poets.
The sun the moon the stars the polar ice caps
and the ice cream cones the city streets the
side streets and the small tv the curve of
flesh around the food the road maps and
November and the tiny birds and also certain
people and they loved the special chairs and
also stuffed things and the carnival and big
rings and the o rings and they loved the
oranges in bags and florida and texas and the
hotel room and they loved the chili on the
highway that they loved as if they loved the
onramp and the way that people called and
the natural forces of destruction and the sea
they loved the sea and also boats and sailing
ships and whales they loved and sea birds in
varieties and then they loved the choice of
drinks to drink and also beer they loved
the times that others liked them that they loved
and also they loved things all shaped like
tapirs and they loved the zoo.
Propelled by magic wings
of butterflies, Ananda
leaps into the air: Flight.
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